Posted:5th Mar 2008This is a small but simple theory about isolations mostly but will also touch on the subject of extensions.

Imagine this as your arm from your shoulder and down to your fingertips. Each "." being a point that you can bend:

.---.---.-..

What we see above is our arm: shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand, fingers.

Any point from the shoulder to the end of the poi itself can be used as the center of rotation, theoretically. But to simplify there are three common points to spin without extensions the points are located:

.--.--.

The above image shows the different places that can be used as the center beyond using extensions. The following are: normal spin, isolated spin, perfect isolated spin.

That gives us: .---.---.-..--.--. ( I removed one dot in the row of two because of the insignificant difference of spinning the poi with your fingers or just outside of them )

Seven points to play with. But wait there is more. What if there was artificial isolations. Or "Phantom" isolations. A "Phantom" isolation would be isolating on a point beyond a perfect isolation. Now this might sound impossible at first, but it is actually possible to do as with perfect isolations you can only do it for a short while tho.

Now the fun part is that any extension can be mixed with the Isolations or the normal spin. In that regard, most of our flowers spin around 0, and therefore they are extensions without any isolation. I understand this is not exactly the case with antispin ( care to tell me why? ) I think it's a case related to the relation the extension has to the arm rather then if it's actually isolating a part of it.

This is the thing i realized today. If I almost stall my poi up and down, heads towards each other, then I can isolate them almost perfectly and sometimes beyond that, closer to a "Phantom" And if one can do that while doing flowers ( will be a hell to do it fluently ) it would make for some really intriguing patterns I think. Lockouts would never be the same again.